Influencer marketing is now a standard line item in many brands’ advertising budgets—and a $21.1 billion industry in its own right. As 2024 begins, executives intimately familiar with the ever-evolving nature of the industry are eyeing several potential shifts in how brands and agencies incorporate creators into their marketing. 

Buzzy topics such as generative AI and social commerce are predictably top of mind for many of these marketers, and several are also anticipating foundational changes in how brands and agencies view and collaborate with influencers. 

“For the first time, we’re hearing much more of a consciousness about creators not being a commodity—that they’re real people,” said Permele Doyle, founder and president of influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy. “We’re seeing the big brands and the big groups are much more vocal about that, and they want to know how we’re going to really help them build a true relationship with the creators, and they want more access to the creators. It really is just this shift in mindset about [influencers’] role and being much more supportive of them.” 

More news: The 5 biggest creators of 2024

Here are five of the trends influencer marketing executives predict will shape the industry as it continues its rapid upward trajectory in 2024.

AI streamlines content creation and expedites influencer partnerships

Several influencer marketers are anticipating the release of a slew of new AI-powered tools in 2024 to assist with everything from matching brands to compatible creator partners to accelerating the pace of content creation. 

Leveraging AI to connect brands with creators isn’t anything new—influencer marketing platforms such as Influential and BENlabs have been doing so for several years. But agencies and social media platforms are now beginning to incorporate artificial intelligence into their brand-creator matches, too. In November, Billion Dollar Boy launched Muse, an “innovation unit” researching and exploring generative AI’s role in the creator economy that has already linked brands such as Versace to AI artists, including Jo Ann and Anastasia Rogozhina.

Creator-led shopping platform LTK is also weaving artificial intelligence into its brand-creator matchmaking capabilities. The platform late last year rolled out LTK Match.AI, a tool (currently in beta) that analyzes creators’ past posts and their performance among the creators’ audiences to recommend optimal creator partners to brands, and vice versa. 

Social media platforms such as Snapchat, YouTube and Meta also introduced generative AI-powered features last year, from “Dream Screen,” which allows YouTube Shorts creators to generate video or image backgrounds using AI, to Snapchat’s “My AI” chatbot, which Snapchatters sent more than 10 billion messages to between February and June 2023 alone. 

More from Ad Age: Top 5 AI activations of 2023

Features such as YouTube’s AI-powered dubbing tool Aloud could even revolutionize what brands are looking for in a creator partner and the types of audiences those creators are able to reach, said Anthony Hamelle, executive director of digital and social at TBWA\Chiat\Day New York. 

“We’re going to see big mega-influencers become even bigger because now they can reach worldwide audiences without any respect for language barriers with the help of AI dubbing tools,” he said. “And that is going to put those creators in an even better position for global deals with brands, and those brands are, for sure, going to want to work with an influencer not just in one market but everywhere. On the other end of the spectrum, more niche, micro-creators are going to have the tools to produce much more content at the same cost.” 

Indeed, a September report from learning platform Creator Now found that 97% of 2,200 surveyed creators were already incorporating AI into their content creation process, with roughly 60% reporting AI enables them to put out content more quickly and about 40% saying AI helps them produce better quality content. But the same survey also revealed that half of those creators are concerned that AI-generated content put out by social platforms will replace human content creators, putting them out of a job. 

“Right now, it’s better for creators, but the big danger is going to be if the pendulum flips and the brands start saying [to creators], ‘I know you’re using AI, and I want you to use AI. And I expect twice as much content for half the price, and I want it 10 times faster,’” said Jamie Gutfreund, founder of creator economy consultancy Creator Vision, which teamed up with Creator Now on its AI survey. “And what’s to stop them from saying that?”

Social commerce skyrockets—and more brands take the plunge

The power of the “TikTok made me buy it” phenomenon has been well established in the influencer marketing sphere since the early days of the pandemic—but the words “on TikTok” may soon be appended to the end of that mantra, if some of the early results of TikTok Shop are any indication. 

Brands such as Tarte Cosmetics, PacSun, and fashion brand Cider have already driven tens of thousands of sales through TikTok Shop since its September rollout to all U.S. users. Though many brands have hesitated to join TikTok’s in-app shopping platform thus far, others are expressing substantial interest in TikTok Shop, according to several influencer marketers. 

“I’ve seen a lot of excitement from brands about TikTok Shop,” said Erin Amend, VP of creators and casting at Day One Agency. “But while brands have been a little slower in getting onto TikTok Shop than we might have expected to see, I’ve heard from a lot of creators that this affiliate offering they have is really interesting.” 

TikTok Shop’s affiliate program—which allows creators to embed a product link into their video and earn a commission for any sales that it drives—has been behind the majority of PacSun and Cider’s TikTok Shop transactions, they told Ad Age. It’s effectively a formalized, commission-based version of the organic “TikTok made me buy it” effect. And that program, along with other commission-based programs like it, will likely continue to be a pivotal part of social commerce in 2024, said Meridith Rojas, chief brand officer of influencer marketing platform Captiv8. 

“In my opinion, the future is all affiliate,” she said. “It’s not limited to TikTok Shop—affiliate [marketing] across the board has had a major glow-up. It’s not your affiliate program from five years ago with coupon codes that kind of felt cheap. And it’s definitely more of the way that people want to interact with creators, where it’s not interrupting the content—by design, it enables people to click to buy something without someone giving them the hard sell.” 

Social platforms including Instagram and Pinterest are leaning into shoppable content, too. And with Gen Z consumers increasingly turning to social media to discover products and seek out reviews, agencies such as TBWA\Chiat\Day New York are encouraging brands to develop social commerce strategies. 

Also read: 5 Gen Z shopping trends to watch in 2024

“[TikTok Shop] is something that we’re really trying to push,” said Lesley Parks, the agency’s executive strategy director of social and content. “Old, old news, but TikTok is the preferred search engine of Gen Z, and we’re sort of seeing that [marketing] funnel collapse on TikTok because you can now have that fully-fledged experience—you have reviews that support product discovery. We’re not necessarily seeing our clients asking for it, but we do have CPG clients who should be considering it, especially in beauty.”

Brands emulate content creators

Throughout 2023, brands have increasingly sought to model their short-form video content on the lo-fi, unpolished style of creators—and for many brands, that has meant turning to creators themselves to produce social content for the brand’s channels. This “user-generated content,” as it’s been dubbed (somewhat inaccurately, as it stems specifically from content creators rather than everyday users, as the term was originally used to describe) is “more cost-efficient than traditional production [and] it’s more on trend with the authentic look and feel” of platforms such as TikTok, said Keith Bendes, VP of strategy, marketing and growth at influencer marketing platform Linqia. 

Influencer marketers agree that this approach to working with creators—where brands “aren’t paying for their reach, they’re just paying for their skills, from a content perspective,” Bendes said—will persist, and likely even accelerate, in 2024. This could take several forms, from brands bringing on in-house creators to reposting creators’ content to their own channels or putting paid support behind it, rather than the traditional creator partnership in which a brand sponsors a post on the influencer’s account. 

“We’ve seen [UGC] on the rise for the past couple of years, but brands are really starting to understand the impact creator-style content has, and many have made it a really core part of their marketing strategies” in 2023, Amend said. “Brands, especially those who are tuned in with the way that audiences are consuming content, are turning to this creator-style approach to their own content more and more.”

In this type of partnership, brands are most often leveraging creators to help them create entertaining content for the brand’s social account that blends seamlessly into the creator content surrounding it in social media feeds, Gutfreund said. And that desire for creator-style content is also starting to trickle into “historically conservative” categories such as business-to-business tech brands, the pharmaceutical industry and financial services companies, said Sarah Early, head of emerging platforms for United Talent Agency’s entertainment and culture marketing division

For example, the agency sent YouTubers and podcasters Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry to Salesforce’s “Dreamforce” event in September, and tech company Cisco now “uses creators all the time to share out their messaging,” she said. 

“There’s always a lot of concern around risk or how their brand could show up with talent,” she added. “I think the Budweiser moment spooked a lot of brands, so it has been really refreshing to see these categories start to think about how to enter the space and having really honest conversations with us around what those risks could be and how to minimize them and kind of manage that process.” 

Brands may also increasingly lean into their own employees as influencers in 2024, said Rahul Titus, global head of influencer marketing at Ogilvy.

“We think 2024 is the year where you’re going to start seeing employee advocacy really come into its own in terms of fully formed programs—everything from employee retention to marketing to loyalty,” he said in late 2023. “The most exciting part to me is employers using employees as part of their B2C marketing and comms strategies. We’ve seen beauty brands like Sephora and L’Oréal really lead the way in this and incentivizing their employees to basically promote their products [on social media] with discount codes and access to exclusive offers. A lot of that has been quite grassroots, so far, but I think next year (2024), it’s going to suddenly get very professional.”

Creators expand beyond social media feeds—and brands follow them

Content creation has long been synonymous with posting on social media, but that association is going to increasingly be challenged in 2024. Brands already started increasingly tapping creators for offline efforts in 2023, as TikTok creator Chris Olsen said during an Advertising Week New York panel in October.

“I have been seeing more often, especially in more of a post-Covid world, worked into brand deals are these in-person events or appearances,” he said. “One of the best parts about it [is] if you’re in-person with some of the brand reps [creating content], everything moves very fast. Everyone can have the conversations in person … it makes it very efficient.”

Brands that have risen to online prominence in the past few years, such as Stanley and Cider, leaned into pop-up experiences in 2023, inviting creator partners to meet with brand executives and get a feel for the brand offline.

Also read: Stanley hires GSD&M as its first TikTok AOR

Creator content will also jump to new screens in 2024 through TikTok’s “Out of Phone” ad offering, part of which allows brands to bring their influencer campaigns on TikTok to digital out-of-home displays such as billboards or subway station screens. Connected TV is also a burgeoning medium for creators—Linqia is currently working on multiple CTV spots that leverage creators’ content, Bendes said, and creators such as YouTube group Dude Perfect have launched streaming services available through CTV.

“The proliferation of creator and influencer content outside the walls of social is one of the big predictions, for sure, next year,” Bendes, referring to 2024. “We’re going to start seeing it in CTV commercials, on display ads, [and] on digital out-of-home mechanisms. And that means post-production is going to be a big part of the value, in terms of taking the [creator] content you already own and just optimizing it for different placements.”

Younger consumers, particularly Gen Z, are also driving a renewed interest in a more intimate social media experience based around interacting only with friends or niche online communities, rather than sharing content with thousands of virtual strangers—a phenomenon Deloitte Digital’s managing director and head of social, content and influencer refers to as the “close friends trend” (a nod to Instagram’s “Close Friends” feature, which allows users to curate a smaller list of followers to share their more-personal content with). 

Many consumers are following their friends or favorite creators to private communities or channels on platforms such as Discord, and TBWA’s Parks envisions brands will leverage that desire for close-knit communities in 2024. 

“I think we are going to see more brands launch these private communities and exclusive broadcast channels to engage with different people … and really personalize those experiences,” she said. She pointed to Louis Vuitton’s recent launch of a Discord server as an example of the trend already starting to take shape. “It kind of harkens back to the early days of social media, and that’s a fun thing to watch brands take advantage of.” 

A long-form video renaissance

Marketers have zeroed in on TikTok as the best platform to reach teen consumers, but a recent Pew Research Center survey of 13-to-17-year-olds revealed YouTube is actually the most popular social platform by far among that age cohort with 93% saying they regularly use YouTube. Just 63% reported using the second-most-popular social platform, TikTok, and 71% of respondents said they use YouTube at least once per day, with 16% reporting they use the platform “almost constantly.”

“Long-form is where the [social] platforms are going,” Gutfreund said. TikTok, for example, is nudging creators toward making longer video content through its Creativity Program fund, which requires creators’ videos to be longer than one minute to be eligible for monetization. TikTok users now spend half their time on the platform watching videos over a minute long, per TikTok’s description of the Creativity Program, and the maximum video length on the platform has swelled to 30 minutes. 

“YouTube is the place where there’s a big opportunity for brands to have growth and recognition and impact,” Gutfreund said. “I think that’s the future. But brands are more comfortable ceding creative control [to creators] with short-form, because it’s about a minute long. If it’s a long-form, it’s a lot scarier, because it’s now considered a film … and it requires a much bigger consideration. But that’s going to be something that the smart brands are going to start to get focused on—being able to deliver creator-driven, long-form content.” 

In other words, the satirical TikTok reality series and sitcoms brands from Neutrogena to Duolingo released in 2023 could very well become full-blown TikTok or YouTube productions in 2024.